domingo, 16 de fevereiro de 2014

Cine Me

 
 
The Wolf of Wall Street
 
 
 
 
 
 
“The Wolf of Wall Street” is an X-ray of the ubiquitous and the inadmissible. It lends new meaning to the tell-all: there’s no fleeting desire or base thought that can flicker through Belfort’s mind that Scorsese can’t or won’t show—and nothing he shows flickering onto the screen that can’t give outrageous delight. That’s the reason for the critical outcry. It’s tempting to ascribe the complaints to an op-ed mentality—to critics who fall back on politics to justify their involvement with anything so suspect as the entertainment industry or so frivolous as aesthetic pleasures, and the more extreme the aesthetic (as in the case of Scorsese’s movie), the more righteous the response in the name of principle. But there’s something else at stake in their reproaches that gets even closer to the specific greatness of Scorsese’s achievement. Critics railing at the movie aren’t just railing at Belfort, or even at the world; those who are decrying its extremes are maintaining their own innocence, protesting all too much their immunity to its temptations.
 
 
Everything about The Wolf of Wall Street is excessive. Its absurdly long three-hour length is in keeping with the indulgences of its characters.
 
Intense performance from the talented actor, Leonardo DiCaprio. Amazing direction from Martin Scorsese. The movie is a bit over the top but still a good movie overall.

sábado, 15 de fevereiro de 2014

Cine Me

 
Her
 
 
 
 
 
‘Her’ is a keeper of a film, quietly dazzling. It’s directed by Spike Jonze (the man behind ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’). Shot in the hazy, honeyed glow of a quirky car ad, you can watch it simply as the history of one man’s romantic life. There are four Hers. First is Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara, go-to actress for a frosty ex), who we see in flashback and one bitter scene where she is devastating about his relationship with Samantha: ‘You always wanted a wife without the challenges of someone real.’ Next is Samantha, then there’s a disastrous blind date scene with Olivia Wilde. In the background is Amy Adams (so natural, she barely seems to be acting) as Theodore’s geeky-cool best friend.
 
Some of the ideas about intimacy in ‘Her’ are as old as the typewriter. Is this love, or does this person just make me feel comfortable? It gets twisty as Sam discovers her consciousness. Who is more human, distracted, switched-off? Theodore? Or Sam, who’s writing music and learning quantum physics. And more scary even than computer love are the fashions of the near future. Like a geography teacher dressed for a night out, Phoenix wears some worrying high-waisted dad-slacks.
 
‘Falling in love is a form of socially acceptable insanity,’ she says, and that being the case, why should it be any more insane to fall for an operating system than for a human being? That’s the fundamental message of Her, a charming romantic comedy for the computer age. A rom.com.

sexta-feira, 14 de fevereiro de 2014

There ain't no cure for love



 
I loved you for a long, long time
I know this love is real
It don't matter how it all went wrong
That don't change the way I feel
And I can't believe that time's
Gonna heal this wound I'm speaking of
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure for love.

I'm aching for you baby
I can't pretend I'm not
I need to see you naked
In your body and your thought
I've got you like a habit
And I'll never get enough
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure for love

There ain't no cure for love
There ain't no cure for love
All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky
The holy books are open wide
The doctors working day and night
But they'll never ever find that cure for love
There ain't no drink no drug
(ah tell them, angels)
There's nothing pure enough to be a cure for love

I see you in the subwayand I see you on the bus
I see you lying down with me, I see you waking up
I see your hand, I see your hair
Your bracelets and your brush
And I call to you, I call to you
But I don't call soft enough
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure for love

I walked into this empty church I had no place else to go
When the sweetest voice I ever heard, whispered to my soul
I don't need to be forgiven for loving you so much
It's written in the scriptures
It's written there in blood
I even heard the angels declare it from above
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure,
There ain't no cure for love

There ain't no cure for love
There ain't no cure for love
All the rocket ships are climbing through the sky
The holy books are open wide
The doctors working day and night
But they'll never ever find that cure,
That cure for love

quarta-feira, 12 de fevereiro de 2014

terça-feira, 11 de fevereiro de 2014

Unsaid feelings

 
 
 
 
(...)
Se soubesses (que nunca soubeste) como te amei. Ou não era amor, era paixão. Apaixonada por ti, passava dias a pensar se vier, se não vier. E uma palavra tua: mais que um sol inteiro.
(...)
Ao meu lado, hoje, olhava a tua nuca. A minha mão à distância possível, mas à distância toda da impossibilidade, do que não posso, não devo, não ouso. Mas quero.
(...)
Por que te permiti que entrasses, porquê um telefonema, porquê continuar em folhas (tantas) uma amizade que eu só queria amizade, mesmo querendo amor? Desejava tanto só amizade. Ser capaz de te amar só assim. Sem este tremer de vela que eu não sei apagar. Não sei. Não sou capaz. E nunca to direi, nunca a coragem de uma confissão.
(...)
Queria beijar-te. Como não deve ser, mas como deve ser. Sabes como me sinto quando falas assim, em displicência e riso, de coisas tão de corpo?
(...)
 
 


Ana Luísa Amaral

domingo, 9 de fevereiro de 2014

Cine Me

 
Philomena
 
 
 
 
 
 
British director Stephen Frears (The Queen, High Fidelity), hits his stride again after a few stumbles with the new film Philomena, a drama that mixes some cozy truths and righteous indignation.
Featuring an unlikely duo in acerbic comic Steve Coogan (The Trip, 24 Hour Party People) as a jaded journalist and Dame Judi Dench as a kindly, indomitable Irish woman, the film is a calculated crowd-pleaser. But it’s a crowd-pleaser with political bite, drawing parallels between the cruel treatment of young unwed mothers in 1950s Ireland and of gay AIDS patients in the United States a few decades later.
 
 
 

Enclose me

 
 
somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
 
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


e.e.cummings

sábado, 8 de fevereiro de 2014

Cine Me

 
 
 
The Book Thief
 
 
 
 
The brute facts of the Second World War in Germany—Nazi oppression, hunger, people hiding in basements—have been turned into a pleasantly meaningless tale of good-heartedness, complete with soft lyrical touches and a whimsical appearance, as a narrator, by Death, who should have laid this movie to rest.
 
Film adaptations have a way of toying with the affections of book fans, sometimes shining a light on both insights and flaws that readers may have overlooked.
 
The film version of The Book Thief is no exception. Brian Percival’s handsome direction of Markus Zusak’s beloved novel does an eloquent job telling the story of Liesel (Sophie Nélisse), a young girl struggling to make sense of the world during the Holocaust. The film, narrated by Death (voiced by Roger Allam), powerfully reminds us that all humans, no matter how important they think they are, die.
But the film’s unwavering focus on Liesel puts an uncomfortably soft, even at times cheery coming-of-age spin on too much of the tale, rendering a backdrop of concentration camps, torture and murder all too far away, if not disconcertingly unimaginable.
 
The film tenderly portrays Liesel’s journey from illiteracy to someone with a passion for books. That parallels her transformation from scared child to a caring and courageous young woman. Painterly portraits of empty, frozen, white expanse in the opening scenes give way to a library of vibrantly colored tomes that offer a portal to a wonderland of possibilities.
 
Pretty visuals give an unexpectedly painful twist to other parts of the story. 
 
It’s hard not to hear echoes of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” as cherry-red Nazi flags fly gaily in the breeze or when people toss censored books in the public bonfire and look the other way when Jewish neighbors are ripped brutally from their homes and sent to likely deaths.

sexta-feira, 7 de fevereiro de 2014

Embrace the moment

 
 
(...) a aproximação mútua era sempre o excedente de uma alteridade e o instante do abraço era só inebriante porque não era mais que um instante.

Milan Kundera

So stay

 
 
Life will give you experience, a lot of it, and you will learn and grow and bloom. It will give you a hundred reasons to go, but a thousand reasons to stay. So stay.

segunda-feira, 3 de fevereiro de 2014

You're my everything

 
 
And in this crazy life, and through these crazy times
It's you, it's you, You make me sing
You're every line, you're every word, you're everything.


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